15 Million Hits and Counting

15 million hits on Indian Railways Websites

15 million hits a day is what the railways is boasting about for its two website indianrail.gov.in and trainenquiry.com. On the basis of this they are inviting advertising agencies and other media houses for an online advertising tender contract.

So why am I writing this article? Humm… there is a good reason behind it. Let me start with the definition of a HIT

A website HIT is defined as: The number of times a Web page sitting on a server has been accessed. A server answers this number of individual requests in order to render a Web page completely. If a Web page contains a number of elements, each element is counted as an individual hit. This is a very poor guide to traffic measurement because each time a server sends a file to a browser it is recorded in the server log file as a ‘hit’. Hits are generated for EVERY element of a requested page, including any graphics, interactive element or text.

This means that if there are 20 graphic on a single webpage and it is accessed by 1 unique visitor then it will generate 21 hits (20 graphics + text), So assuming 1 user would visit a minimum of 2 pages, the hits generated would be 40.

When it comes to the Indian railways websites, both of them combines has about 25 graphic and text elements on a single page. So if 1 unique visitor would visit on an average 5 pages (5 is still less) on the Indian railways website, the visitor would generate 125 hits. By doing simple math it shows that 15 million hits would translate to about 12,000 unique visitors.

Now the number does not seem that big… this is the real number on which advertising cost should be determined and not by counting Hits.

In this age of false advertising, even the government is not that far behind. Don’t you think they should provide the detailed website statistics if they are looking for advertisers?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “15 Million Hits and Counting”

  1. This is new information… then my hits would be around 2 milion a day

  2. When Railways say 15 millions hit a day, it means 15 millions visits a day. This site is really that popular as you yourself may well be aware.

  3. Atul, if it is 15 million a day then it would cross 450 mil a month resulting in over a billion pageviews, this is more than some of the popular portals catering not just India but the world, so i really really doubt if that is the traffic they are getting. Also i don’t think their servers can take that kind of load.

  4. Indian Railways servers cope well with the passenger reservation system where millions of reservations are done every day. The PNR enquiry system is a popular site to check the reservation status of these enquiries. Both these sites definitely get millions of views per day, I am sure.

    Next, you may say that millions of passengers travelling on Indian Railways daily is a myth too. Millions of passngers travel daily in Mumbai locals itself.

  5. Atul, millions of passengers do travel using the Indian railways but they ALL do not book online. Visit trainenquiry.com website and see the hit counter which is placed at the bottom, with a simple calculation i could work out that they are getting about 110,000 pageviews a day. Even if i take one page view as one visitor it still does not add up to 15 million.

  6. The figure may not in the region of 15 millions, but still I will not call is as misleading as the propaganda of most other organisations in India. If they have calculated it using your process ( one page view counting for 20 odd clicks) then may be it is more than even 15 millions, but your figure appears more reasonable for pageviews, and that is considerable by any yardsticks.